Android gaining on Apple iOS in mobile web market share

Android's share of U.S. mobile web traffic climbed to 25% in August in its best one month gain since Nov. 2009.

Web statistics company Quantcast published the data, which tracked U.S. mobile web consumption in the month of August, on Friday. Android saw a 2% gain in mobile web market share while all other platforms lost share.

In an earlier post, Quantcast noted that it "does not include Apple's iPad in mobile web consumption analysis," although it did not specifically state whether the iPad's figures are excluded from the most recent data set. According to Net Applications, which includes the iPad in its figures, iOS is now the third most popular Web browsing platform globally.

Over the past year, Apple has lost ground to Google, losing 11% of the mobile web consumption market while Google picked up 17% more market share. iOS still maintains a significant lead with 56% of the market, more than twice that of Android, but current growth trends could cause problems for Apple in the near future. If Google can maintain another year of comparable growth, Android will be nearly neck-and-neck with iOS.

The mobile web race continues to be mostly between Google and Apple, as RIM's market share dipped from 10% to 9% last quarter and the combined market share of all other platforms hovered around 10%.

Google's multi-carrier, multi-manufacturer strategy seems to be working. During the second quarter of this year, shipments of Android-based smartphones outpaced iPhones for the first time.

Wall street analysts have warned that Apple may be nearing saturation on the AT&T network in the U.S. Shaw Wu with Kaufman Bros. suggests that a deal between Apple and Verizon could help the iPhone regain some lost market share. With its 93 million subscribers, Verizon could more than double Apple's potential iPhone customer base in the U.S.